Why use a wiki?

We originally began using wikis with Theme 3 and realized how easy they were to store work on. They provide the following benefits:

• a facility for students to post their work
• a medium for collaboration
• a place to bring all the links together (instructions, activities, visuals, blogs etc)
• a text that cannot be lost (unless we get 'blocked'!)
• allows teachers to work both collaboratively and together
• saving paper

Student experiences?

Some students do find the wiki pages difficult to read.They need to be guided through the use of the navigation bar, and directed on scrolling down carefully. Often they might miss important information. We have found that they tend not to use the navigation bar properly and some even have to be reminded that they can use the table of contents or that they can use the mouse/key pad/page down toggle to scroll down.

Research on this indicates that online reading is a different skill. We are only just beginning to address this. Below are sites with some interesting insights and suggestions for stratgies:

http://iteslj.org/Articles/Tseng-TextOnTheWeb.html
http://researchnews.osu.edu/archive/comptext.htm
http://www.noodletools.com/debbie/literacies/basic/readstrat/readingstrategies.viewlet/readingstrategies_viewlet_swf.html

Further resources

Discussions of experiences in using wikis
http://www.shambles.net/pages/learning/ict/wikiedu/

'Using wiki in education'
http://www.wikiineducation.com/display/ikiw/Home

'Wikis, blogs and podcasts: a new generation of Web-based tools for virtual collaborative clinical practice and education'
http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=1564136